WOMAN IN ART
all reflected the lurid light from the great cauldrons of fluid metal, and below, against dark retainers, were seen spurts and fountains of red hot spray.
"Her sketches for this rather daring venture into a field seldom invaded by artists of her sex were made from direct observation of the process of "Steel Production," as she calls her painting. She watched the drama of man's mastery over iron in the work of the Bourne-Fuller Company of Cleveland, and her record of what she witnessed is accurate and convincing enough to satisfy a lifelong steel-worker, provided that he shall have a sense of decorative values and some consciousness of the victory of mind over matter, which is impressively set forth in Miss Holden's painting. For her rendering of the tremendous scene, which is so constantly enacted and so seldom witnessed by any eyes but those of the workers in the mills, is essentially the depicting of a triumph of the human brain. Brawny men stand watching the outpouring of molten metal from the great container above the molds to be filled. One is impressed with the tremendous forces visibly chained in the service of man, but the whole scene is one which shows mind reigning over matter, where immense weight and power dominate the processes of creative industry. Indeed, so easily does the intelligence of man rule the gigantic mechanism of his devising that this big picture is almost serene in its mastery.
"Miss Holden's strong painting fits into the warm browns and yellows of the wall that arches above it so that it suggests a temple of fire, power, and steel, instead of a bank decoration. With admirable restraint, for which Walker & Weeks, architects of the bank, may no doubt be given much credit, this big mural painting stands alone, the one picture on the walls of a noble room."
The next step Miss Holden takes to find an appropriate subject for another mural decoration leads her thought and study to ancient Greece and its mythical nobility. It is the Allen Memorial Medical Library of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, that calls for her next work. The subject is the life of Asklepios, the mythical Greek doctor, who became a god. He was a son of Apollo and the nuyph Coronis, and Apollo did very well by his offspring; he had him educated in an exclusive school, which Cheiron the Centaur conducted in a grotto in Thessaly. Jason, Achilles and Theseus were educated in the same school. Asklepios became a great and beloved doctor, and later a god, and his son Machaon became a famous surgeon and took care of Menelaus when he was struck by an arrow.
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